04 March 2013

How (not) to save money

Because of their fear that public money would be used to fund abortions, Texas legislators decided to save money by stopping funding of public health clinics:

In the fiscal crunch of 2011, the Legislature
cut the state’s family-planning budget by two-thirds, with some
lawmakers claiming that they were defunding the “abortion industry.”
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, found that more than
50 family-planning clinics had closed statewide as a result.

If we grant that these centers are actually performing abortions on tax-payer money, I can understand this move. (Not saying they were, just granting it for argument's sake.) I find them backpedaling now because the lives they saved are actually going to cost them money even more appalling and angering than the original cut.

They weren't. That is illegal (since 1976) due to the Hyde Amendment, and if Texas thought they had a chance to take down PP on the Hyde Amendment, they would have jumped on that so fast your head would spin. Have you been reading LifeNews or something?

They show a total lack of critical thinking, failing even to understand cause and effect. As we can assume that many of these children would not have been born if their parents had had access to birth control, then we may posit that a goodly proportion of them are unwanted. There are all kinds of statistics that indicate that unwanted children act out in many ways, thus costing society even more money, not to mention grief.

Just as some liberals passed ObamaCare without reading it, figuring they could alter it later to address unintended consequences, so too did the Texas lawmakers.

Say what you will about the Left and the Right, they are still human beings who are governed by rationality. The difference is in those who willfully act like this isn't so for one side or with the other

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